I am a postdoc in Dr. Douglas Garrett's Lifespan Neural Dynamics Group at the Max Planck UCL Centre for Computational Psychiatry and Ageing Research, located at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Berlin, Germany.

I am interested in the brain mechanisms and processes that transform subjective perceptual experiences into purposeful actions – perceptual decision-making, in short. In particular, I like to study how these mechanisms change with age and how the state of arousal affects decisions – for example, how decision-making in drowsy and alert brains differs from each other.

I use visual and auditory perceptual tasks to study these topics, often combined with eye tracking and pupil size measurements as well as neuroimaging methods such as electro- or magneto-encephalography (E/MEG), or functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI).

In my current work I combine eye tracking and fMRI to investigate how people view pictures of everyday scenes and how their viewing style is reflected in the dynamics of their brain activity. In another line of research I use psychopharmacology and MEG to study how the arousal-related noradrenaline and dopamine brain systems affect the way in which we make basic perceptual decisions. Finally, in another study I investigate if the variability of neural signals measured with EEG could reflect a decision-maker’s subjective certainty about the occurrence of hardly visible perceptual events.